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Play fucking loud!
Jul. 3rd, 2007 09:46 amBellowhead (warning: music plays automatically) last night at the Gala theatre: if what you want is volume, get eleven musicians in your band, including four brass players and a percussionist - and then amplify them. The initial impression is just the shock of that impact, hitting us right up at the top of the balcony; but mercifully below the pain threshold, so we sat back and enjoyed it.
I knew very little of the band's work: I'd seen them play on the BBC Folk Awards show a year ago, and that's about it. I might have expected them to play more instrumentals than songs, but that's all, and even that was wrong: they started with Rigs of the Times - "honesty is all out of fashion / These are the rigs of the times...", a cynical catalogue of contemporary frauds which could come from the Kurt Weill songbook but in fact comes, like so much of the new folk music, from the repertoire of Martin Carthy. Carthy was namechecked later, after a version of The Outlandish Knight with a klezmer introduction.
Some things worked better for me than others: Flash Company set the vocal against a freeform assortment of tuning up / winding down noises: jazz, or humour - I don't know. I found it interesting at first, and then tiresome, I wanted the song to emerge from the cacophony. Listening now to some of their material online, perhaps the voice was mixed further back in the live performance than for the studio pieces, but songs with a single voice worked fine: where the arrangement used multiple voices it became rather blurred, and less satisfying.
Instrumental pieces were good, apart from the general difficulty of hearing a rousing dance tune in a packed (and, in the gallery, very steeply raked) theatre. I particularly liked one whose name I now can't remember (something like If you do not want me, let me go); the final was the splendidly named sequence Frogs Legs and Dragon's Teeth.
There's more music on Bellowhead's MySpace page - where the listing of the band members has just allowed me to make a connection: inevitably, a band mixing traditional music with brass is going to be compared to Brass Monkey (now, they did cross the pain threshold!), but I have just realised that Bellowhead's guitar and bouzouki player is Benji Kirkpatrick, so there's a direct link as well!
I knew very little of the band's work: I'd seen them play on the BBC Folk Awards show a year ago, and that's about it. I might have expected them to play more instrumentals than songs, but that's all, and even that was wrong: they started with Rigs of the Times - "honesty is all out of fashion / These are the rigs of the times...", a cynical catalogue of contemporary frauds which could come from the Kurt Weill songbook but in fact comes, like so much of the new folk music, from the repertoire of Martin Carthy. Carthy was namechecked later, after a version of The Outlandish Knight with a klezmer introduction.
Some things worked better for me than others: Flash Company set the vocal against a freeform assortment of tuning up / winding down noises: jazz, or humour - I don't know. I found it interesting at first, and then tiresome, I wanted the song to emerge from the cacophony. Listening now to some of their material online, perhaps the voice was mixed further back in the live performance than for the studio pieces, but songs with a single voice worked fine: where the arrangement used multiple voices it became rather blurred, and less satisfying.
Instrumental pieces were good, apart from the general difficulty of hearing a rousing dance tune in a packed (and, in the gallery, very steeply raked) theatre. I particularly liked one whose name I now can't remember (something like If you do not want me, let me go); the final was the splendidly named sequence Frogs Legs and Dragon's Teeth.
There's more music on Bellowhead's MySpace page - where the listing of the band members has just allowed me to make a connection: inevitably, a band mixing traditional music with brass is going to be compared to Brass Monkey (now, they did cross the pain threshold!), but I have just realised that Bellowhead's guitar and bouzouki player is Benji Kirkpatrick, so there's a direct link as well!
